Pomona College

Dining hall workers at Pomona College have voted to unionize, culminating a three-year campaign that thrust the small liberal arts college into controversy over immigration policy and labor rights. In the election Tuesday, 83 members of the dining hall staff cast ballots, voting 57 to 26 to join UNITE HERE, Local 11, a union that represents about 20,000 hospitality and food service workers in Southern California. “I feel very happy we made it,” said Benny Avina, 46, a catering chef who has worked at the college for 27 years, starting as a dishwasher.

Sichen Hernandez-Martinez is the type of undergraduate who is increasingly in demand at four-year colleges: She had been a community college honors student, a member of campus government and was active in school clubs. After three years at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, she was admitted to USC, UC Riverside and Cal State San Bernardino. She accepted a scholarship to Pomona College, a selective, private school in Claremont, which she entered as a junior this year. The Pomona admissions committee was as impressed with her academics as it was with her community involvement.

Frederick E. Sontag, a professor of philosophy and venerated mentor to three generations of students at Pomona College, where he made headlines nine years ago for forgiving a mentally ill student who had stabbed him in the neck, died Sunday at Pilgrim Place Health Services Center in Claremont. He was 84. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Grant.

Throughout the arduous college application process, Brown University was on the top of Madeline Anderson's wish list. So when the Long Beach high school senior received a rejection from the Ivy League campus, she was disappointed but also knew she had tons of company. The Rhode Island campus accepted just 8.6% of the 30,432 students who had applied for freshman admission, a historic low and down from 9.2% last year. Many other elite colleges across the country also reported dips in their acceptance rates, fueled by a rise in applications from overseas, particularly Asia, and by a trend among high school seniors to try their luck at more schools, experts say. "It did make me upset at first.

The protest at Pomona College on Friday was much like a big outdoor celebration. Tables were set in the middle of the street, a mariachi played, and electrical and grocery union workers served carne asada. But beneath it simmered a dispute between dining hall workers and the administration that has placed the small liberal arts college on the map of the nation's battles over labor and immigration policy. The quarrel over a unionization effort, which had endured for two years, took a dramatic turn in December when the school fired 17 immigrant workers because they could not provide proper paperwork.

Pomona College has announced plans to construct new buildings, renovate and expand others and demolish Holmes Hall and Harwood and Olney dining halls. College spokesmen said a new administration building is planned on the site of Holmes Hall in the center of campus, consolidating offices now in three other buildings. A teaching theater with an auditorium, studios and offices is planned at Bonita and Amherst avenues.

Remembering Gates Re "The warrior chief," Editorial, April 17 It's little wonder The Times' circulation keeps dropping. Your editorial blasting a devoted public servant — former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates — had nary a kind word about a man who spent decades trying to serve and protect. Surely the man did something decent in all the countless hours he worked in the Los Angeles Police Department. If I didn't know any better, I'd say The Times would think the only good thing Daryl Gates did was resign.

A few hundred immigration activists descended Sunday on Pomona College to protest Arizona's controversial anti-illegal immigration law and the policies of commencement speaker Janet Napolitano, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Demonstrators said Napolitano has continued to expand immigration programs that they say were precursors to Arizona's law, which requires police officers to check the immigration status of anybody they stop and suspect may be here illegally.

Paulette F. Bierzychudek , associate professor of biology at Pomona College, has been awarded a $1,000 Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award by the Sears, Roebuck Foundation. She is one of 700 faculty members nationwide selected for the award for resourcefulness and leadership as a private college educator.

Martin G. Ramirez has been appointed to the Pomona College faculty for one year as part of a program to attract minority scholars to careers in academia. Ramirez, a lecturer in biology, holds a doctorate from UC Santa Cruz. As a postdoctoral fellow, he will teach one course per term.

More than 100 colleges and universities, including several in California, promised Thursday to try to attract more low-income students by strengthening relationships with high schools and community colleges, increasing access to advisors and offering more remedial programs. The pledges came after President Obama made increased college accessibility one of his top goals. On Thursday, the president invited to the White House participants who have made commitments to further that effort.

In the spring of 1995, a man's body was found dumped alongside a road in Irvine. He had been beaten and hacked with a meat cleaver. His killing went unsolved for years. Now prosecutors say that Norma Patricia Esparza, who at the time was a sophomore at Pomona College, went to a Santa Ana bar with a group and pointed out a man she said had raped her in her college dormitory -- setting in motion events that left him dead. Esparza, now a respected professor of psychology in Geneva, says she was forced by an aggressive ex-boyfriend to identify her rapist and then conceal his crime for nearly two decades.

November 21, 2013 | By Paloma Esquivel, This post has been corrected, as indicated below.

This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details. A European professor was taken into custody Thursday in an 18-year-old cold case in which she is accused of helping set up the murder of a man she claimed raped her while she was a college sophomore. Patricia Esparza, 39, was handcuffed and taken into custody immediately following a brief hearing in Orange County Superior Court. Prosecutor Scott Simmons said he offered Esparza a plea deal that would require her to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and be sentenced to three years in prison.

One day late last year Norma Patricia Esparza, a respected professor of psychology in Geneva, got on a plane bound for an academic meeting in St. Louis. When the plane landed in Boston for a layover, police met her at the airport and arrested her -- for an 18-year-old slaying in Santa Ana. Esparza, 39, and three others are now facing trial in a homicide that has generated international attention. Prosecutors say that on a night in the spring of 1995, when she was a sophomore at Pomona College, Esparza went to a Santa Ana bar with a group and pointed out a man she said had raped her in her college dormitory.

Katherine Hagedorn was not your stereotypical priestess in the Cuba-based Santeria religion, known for its complex, ecstatic drumming that adherents believe can call forth deities. She grew up in New Jersey, was white, had a doctorate in music and was a longtime popular professor at Pomona College. But as a graduate student on a cold, rainy day at Brown University in 1988, she spotted a poster for an upcoming performance by an Afro-Cuban ensemble of drummers and dancers. The performance changed her life.

The husband of a state correctional officer who was killed in Anaheim 15 years ago will stand trial for her killing starting Wednesday in Orange County. Veteran correctional officer Elizabeth Begaren was shot and killed on an off-ramp of the 91 Freeway on Jan. 17, 1998. She was with her husband, Nuzzio Begaren, and his 10-year-old daughter. Police had long suspected Nuzzio Begaren, who took out a $1-million life insurance police on his wife three days after they were married in the summer of 1997.

Pomona College is the only college in the West and one of 15 colleges nationwide chosen to receive a $480,000 grant that will create a new computer database to strengthen interdisciplinary studies. The Pew Memorial Trust Liberal Arts Enrichment Program, which last year granted $45 million to encourage academic excellence, is designed to develop curriculum innovations that will be shared with other colleges and universities.

Margaret Gay Davies, professor emeritus of history at Pomona College, died Aug. 3 in Santa Barbara following a long illness. She was 87. A former Pasadena resident, Davies taught at the college for 15 years before retiring in 1967. Davies, who suffered a debilitating stroke last February, was a devoted scholar who was popular with students, a colleague said this week. "She was a careful scholar, very devoted to her research," said John H.

Claremont McKenna College on Tuesday announced that it has raised more than $635 million in a fundraising campaign believed to be among the largest for an American liberal arts college. The public campaign was launched in 2008 with a goal of $600 million to support endowed faculty positions, student scholarships, new facilities and building renovations at the small, private college in Claremont, about 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The effort was boosted by gifts from several billionaire alumni, including $200 million from philanthropist Robert Day, $75 million from financier Henry Kravis and $50 million from George R. Roberts, a cousin of Kravis.

A trio of former Pomona College students are declaring war on the password, and they're enlisting consumers to put pressure on technology companies to adopt a more secure log-in process. Brennen Byrne, Mark Hudnall and Jesse Pollak through their start-up Clef launched Petition Against Passwords on Wednesday. Though it's already being viewed as a toothless publicity stunt, industry experts said the initiative should help consumers start to come to grips with a future in which the password isn't at the foundation of logging into websites.